Golf Lessons: How To Swing a Golf Club For Beginners (2022)

Hey everyone, Chuck Quinton from RotarySwing.com. Today, we’re going to talk about learning how to swing a golf club. When you’re learning how to play golf, it’s one of the most confusing things to do, is learn how to properly swing a golf club and hit the ball where you want, because all of us started out pretty much at square one, not having a clue where that ball was gonna go after we hit it.

I learned from the old school way, which was to pretty much dig it out of the dirt. I had a little help. One of my older cousins played golf and he gave me a VHS tape – yes, VHS tape if you still remember what those are – of Jack Nicklaus Golf My Way VCR tapes. And I wore those puppies out. I watched them incessantly. Every single chance I got, I was trying to glean something about how to hit that ball high and straight like Jack and be a great ball striker because I loved to play the game of golf. I played 45 holes a day when I was a kid. I couldn’t get enough of it.

Back and Hip Problems at 19

And so when I was learning how to swing a golf club, I learned the same movements that Jack had. In fact, I’m gonna show you on the website a picture of me or even a video of how I had this big reverse follow through, and even as a young kid I started using Jack Nichlaus’s videos when I was about 14, and by the time I moved to college, I was on a golf scholarship and moved to Colorado, I had … by the time I was 19 I had pretty severe back, hip, knee, foot problems all from my golf swing. At the same time I started learning how to snowboard professionally, and I could snowboard and jump off huge cornices and cliffs and do all these tricks and never ever have any pain or soreness in my body. But hitting a ball with a stick the way that I’d learned from Jack Nicklaus tapes absolutely punished me, and as a young athlete I couldn’t understand why I was constantly in so much pain.

Check Out My Golf Swing Before RotarySwing.com

And so you may have found the same thing. Maybe it wasn’t Jack Nicklaus Golf My Way tapes on VHS, but you may have gone through the same thing when you picked up a golf club and you first started learning how to play. You might have read some golf tips from a magazine or seen something on the golf channel on TV or your buddies tried to help you out. Or you just tried to dig it out of the dirt yourself and said, “Hey, I’ll figure this stuff out. It can’t be that hard.”

Well, it shouldn’t be, but the reality is, when you’re learning how to swing a golf club, you really have to understand several key things. The first thing that I want to give you from my 20-something years of playing golf at a high level, playing competitively, playing professionally for about eight years, is you need to pick one golf swing method and stick with it for the rest of your life. I mean that. That may sound … nobody does that these days. It’s very rare.

Obviously I’d prefer that you pick RotarySwing, because we wanna make sure that you don’t get injured because I went through so many injuries and I’ve seen so many of my friends that I’ve played with professionally who were constantly battling back issues and hip pain in the golf swing and wrist issues and thumb issues and so on.

And with RotarySwing of course we’ve fixed all of those things. That’s why we have such a big panel of renowned medical experts, doctors, orthopedic surgeons, neurosurgeons, learning experts, bio-mechanists, et cetera on our medical panel, because injury prevention, power, efficiency, all of those things are extremely important to us. But while we’ve had members who have been with us for literally well over a decade learning the RotarySwing method and continuing to refine and improve their swings and take their handicaps from 30 to scratch in that time, not everybody’s gonna stick with things because kinda the mentality with golf instruction these days is if you’re gonna learn to swing a golf club, you just go and pick what tour pro you like, how they swing or you just go to your local pro and whatever he’s teaching, god knows what that is. You learn that way, and that’s really the most common way, and people don’t pick a golf swing method. They just take golf tips from one thing and tips from the other.

And if you think about it, that’s pretty much the definition of insanity, because you’re never going to get any better when you don’t work with a golf swing system that is tangible that you can understand, beginning to end, where you’re trying to get. So many golfers, they’re learning how to swing a golf club, they take the band aid approach, and that is, oh, you’re slicing it, so let’s just strengthen your grip and aim way left.

Okay, well, now I just developed either a giant block or a pull hook or whatever it may be. All of these band aid type approaches just lead to more issues because you’re taking a symptomatic approach to fixing your golf swing. You’re just fixing the symptom, you’re not actually fixing the underlying cause of what’s making the golf shots go the way that they’re going. With a golf swing system, when you look at things objectively, you start to understand, okay well, if this piece is here at this point in the golf swing, this is gonna happen. Or if you’re doing this at setup, then this is gonna happen.

RotarySwing Fixes the Cause, Not the Symptom

That’s what RotarySwing is all about. It’s so easy to self diagnose. You don’t need golf instructors sitting on your lap all the time. Not only is that costly and time consuming, but it’s a waste. You need to be able to diagnose and understand your own golf swing faults so that when you’re out on a round of golf and all of a sudden you start blocking it, and you’re like, oh, you know what, am I creating too many secondary axis tilt because I’m pushing too hard off the right foot.

That swifts the swing plane horizontally to the right, and all of a sudden you’re blocking it or you’re not releasing or whatever. That’s what is unique about RotarySwing, is that we show you exactly how to diagnose every single ball flight issue that you have when you’re working with our system. So don’t take the band aid approach, the tips approach, the symptomatic approach. Think about if you learned anything else in your life like that. Think if we were learning how to drive a car. I use the analogy of how to drive a manual transmission all the time, because it’s so applicable to golfers in my age group, 40s, 50s, 60s. We all learned how to drive on manual transmissions.

And imagine if you didn’t have any system to work with. Everybody did it just a little bit different. So you go to one person who’s like, “What I’ve found that if I put my left foot on the gas pedal and my right foot on the clutch, that things work out really great for me.” Well, maybe that guy did it enough times that he found a way to make that work, but that’s completely and utterly ridiculous. It doesn’t make very much sense. It’s not very efficient to have your feet crossing each other.

It was a Big Miss Alright…

But golf is taught exactly like that, and one of my most bizarre things I’ve ever read in my life was Hank Haney’s book. I think it was called The Big Miss. It was talking about his time with Tiger Woods and the things that they did when he was working with Tiger on how he wanted him to swing a golf club. The book, if you haven’t had a chance to read it, please do, because it’ll just blow your mind. It’s worth reading because it’s truly nuts.

Hank Haney, as a golf instructor, is someone that I find challenging to align with on any perspective on the golf swing. I think some of his ideas are interesting, but it’s hard for me to look at him seriously when he admits in the book that he had the driver yips and he was trying all kinds of random tips, things that don’t make any sense, but he was just trying things to try and fix these yips, and one of the things that he did was put the golf club basically in the palm of his left hand.

So he was taking an essentially very, very weak golf grip and, for whatever reason, and then he decided he wasn’t gonna look at the ball. That was the other trick. If you didn’t look at the ball and put the club and the palm in his grip, then all of a sudden his yips went away. If that sounds crazy to you, it’s because it is. But that’s not the crazy part of the story.

The crazy part of the story, again, in the book, it’s documented there. He wrote this himself. He told Tiger the same thing. He said, “Hey, Tiger, I’m struggling with the yips with my driver, and I found out if I put the club in the palm of my grip that all of a sudden my driving was better.” And Tiger took that and I think he sent it to Tiger in email, because at this point Tiger wasn’t really communicating with Hank very well.

Hank felt that Tiger wasn’t really listening to anything he said, so he didn’t know if Tiger was gonna take this advice, which seems insane. He shouldn’t because it’s just one random tip that Tiger clearly didn’t have the yips with the driver, so taking golf lessons from an instructor who did, he’s trying to figure out his own crazy problems through some bizarre way of fixing things, is pretty nuts.

But sure enough, Tiger had just shot, I believe it was at the Buick open I believe. He shot like a 67 that day, had the lead, and the next day goes out and on the range, puts the club in the palm of his hand and starts hitting balls and goes out and plays the rest of the round like that and plays the rest of the week. I can’t remember if he won the tournament. You’ll have to read the book. But long story short, that type of approach is crazy.

Why on earth would you take a golf tip from somebody who’s really struggling and has no fundamental basis or reasoning for why he wants you to do this, he just said, “Hey, I just stumbled upon some random thing that just happened to work with my driver yips and I think you should try it too even though you’re the greatest player in the world and you’re not having the same problems that I have, but maybe this’ll work for you.”

Stick with a System that Works

That approach to golf doesn’t work. It never has worked. It never will work and I think it’s at least a small part of why Tiger left Hank. So what you need to do is commit yourself. When you’re gonna learn how to swing a golf club, commit yourself to the one system that you find resonates with you. Like I said, I’d obviously prefer you work with RotarySwing, but if you don’t, whatever it is, stick with it.

If it makes sense, if it’s not going to get you injured, if it gets you the desired results, don’t change, because every time you just keep bouncing around from one thing to the next, you’re going to have the erratic results that you should expect from trying to drive with your left foot on the gas pedal and your right foot on the clutch. It doesn’t make sense. So the most important thing you’re ever gonna learn from how to swing a golf club is to stick with the system that works, that’s gonna produce the results that you want, that’s proven, and stick with it forever.

The Most Important Fundamental in Golf

The second thing is that you have to work with how your brain learns a new movement pattern. This really should be the most important one. I talk about it so much I don’t wanna keep harping on it, but I wanna mention it again here because it’s so fundamentally important that, again, people ignore the most important fundamental of the golf swing, which is you must work with how your brain learns a new movement pattern.

That seems common sensical, but nobody does that in the golf swing apart from Rotary Swing. Our whole system is build around the neuro-mechanics, the way the brain learns a new movement pattern. In fact, we even brought in the author of The Talent Code, Dan Coyle. New York Times bestselling author. The Talent Code is a book I highly, highly recommend for all of my golf students, and not just for golf. For anything in the world that you wanna learn that is a movement pattern, whether it’s playing a musical instrument, learning how to hit a softball, learning how to skateboard, snowboard, ski, whatever it may be. Learning movement patterns is a very systematic way of doing things if you want to be efficient or proficient at whatever it is you’re wanting to learn how to do.

Think about this. If you’ve ever learned how to play a musical instrument, when you learned how to play the guitar, for instance, if you learned how to play the guitar, piano, whatever it might be, you learned with the basics. You learned with scales and chords and basic finger patterns and so on. You didn’t learn by trying to learn Bach or Beethoven on your first lesson. That sounds silly because it is, but golfers do exactly that.

They don’t learn the fundamentals of the golf swing when they’re learning how to swing a golf club. They go up to the range with their buddies and a beer and a driver and a bunch of balls and they just start wailing away at full speed and then expecting all of this stuff to just magically sort itself out. All you’re doing is learning tons of horrible movement patterns that are also gonna get you injured and they’re not gonna get you the results you’re looking for.

Your Feel May Change, But Your Swing Doesn’t

So the way that your brain learns is one of the most important things that you’re ever going to focus on when you’re learning how to swing a golf club, because if you don’t, all you should expect is inconsistency forever and never to change your swing, and that’s the biggest fault. Golfers think that every time they feel something different in their golf swing that it’s radically different. That’s my favorite trick that my golf students come to me for a lesson and I say, “Okay, I’m gonna video your swing. We’re gonna talk about it, blah blah blah. Just go ahead and step through, hit a couple shots and let me video them.” And they’re like, “Which swing do you want me to use? I’ve got three.” It doesn’t matter because they’re all going to look exactly the same. You don’t change a movement pattern like that. Nobody does.

So when you’re feeling something different, it may feel night and day difference, but the reality is it looks exactly the same on video. So when you’re doing this, it’s because you’re relying on feel instead of what actually changes your swing. You’ve gotta be in front of a mirror. You’ve gotta get instant feedback so you know what you’re working on, which again, why having a golf swing system that you’re working on is so important, because then you can systematically go in front of a mirror and start working on mechanical moves and drills that are gonna actually create a different movement pattern in your brain.

You have to keep repeating that movement over and over again, and that is what allows you to actually learn a new movement pattern and look different. If your swing doesn’t look different and it just feels different after a golf lesson or after something you’re working on, it’s not different. It’s gonna produce the same results.

The golf swing, it’s very, very basic in terms of what’s gonna produce a straight golf shot. It’s not rocket science. The club face is relatively square, the path is relatively square, the ball is gonna go relatively straight assuming you hit it anywhere near the center of the face. But any of those little deviations, hitting it away from the center of the face or changing the path or club face angle, whatever, you’re gonna start getting inconsistent results.

The trick is learning how to produce that same square pattern over and over again and you can’t do that by just feeling something different and then relying on your hand-eye coordination. So two things that you wanna focus on while you’re learning how to swing a golf club, stick with any system that you like. Again, we’d love to have you at RotarySwing. We have over 300,000 members, so we’ve kind of proven ourselves at this point. But more importantly, you need to find the one that you like the most and stick with it forever. Don’t waver. And then make sure that that system is built around how your brain learns. I don’t know any other golf swing system out there in the world that does that, so you may have to do some research on your own to figure that stuff out.

But of course, with RotarySwing, that stuff is all laid out in a step-by-step fashion. In fact, that’s the things that we start with. We don’t actually start with the setup and the golf takeaway and all of those things. We start with how your brain learns. We want you to understand that so that your practice becomes productive. Otherwise practice, just going out there and pounding balls, you might find it enjoyable, but it’s a waste of your time. And especially all that you’re doing is just reinforcing and re-ingraining the existing bad movement patterns that you wanna get rid of. You’re just making yourself an expert at those bad things.

So take a look at the videos that I have here. There’s some links in this blog post here that you can go onto RotarySwing.com and start looking at some of the videos that are gonna show you how your brain learns and get an understanding of how the Rotary system works, RotarySwing system works, and we look forward to seeing you as a member at RotarySwing.com.

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